Well, no, they don't even have their own search engine.
> a search engine's results are only as accurate as the number of users who search and contribute to it
That makes no sense. Anyway, we don't use DDG because its results are shitty.
Like you, I find it often gets me good results on programming or tech topics. Among other things.
> Anyway, we don't use DDG because its results are shitty.
These kind of comments are a bit unnecessary, especially on Hacker News, I believe.
At least, the OP could have elaborated on why does he thinks this way so that everyone could understand why DDG's results are "shitty".
Unfortunately, no one can know what the OP thinks. As a result, it is hurting the work of others without any feedback so that they can improve themselves (i.e. DDG team) and serves little purpose (no explanations on the why) except expressing a frustration.
At least, that's my opinion. Let's be elegant in how do we relate to others. Feel free to disagree with me, but I think this kind of behavior is what creates a more toxic environment in our fields.
1. I type search terms in text form into Google in an attempt to get a list of results that meet my needs. It virtually always gives me high-quality results I need in top few hits. High-quality means the results help me find what I'm looking for or better understand what my search terms describe. I do this into DuckDuckGo, it often provides low-quality results. Low-quality means the results were not relevant to the text I typed in, they were barely relevant to the text I typed in, or they were relevant but had less utility than results from Google.
2. I do exploratory search with Google by typing in words I think are related to the topic I'm trying to understand. It often gives me high-quality results in the top. If I do it with DuckDuckGo, it gives me low-quality results about as often as high-quality results. I see few patterns in the input that would let me accurately gauge whether inserting specific terms into DuckDuckGo instead of Google would produce as many relevant results I could utilize. This makes me unable to know if use of DuckDuckGo will have as high utility for the time and effort invested vs using Google's service. So, as I default on privacy, I had to try inputting the search terms into DuckDuckGo first with expectation it would often not meet my goals, mentally track what it succeed or failed on, and slowly gain instincts on what search terms to skip DuckDuckGo on in favor of Google to be more time-effective. As a Google user, I didn't have this problem that forced me to profile the search engine to gauge when it was capable of performing a search with high-quality results.
That, in detail, is why I had a poor, user experience with the search service provided by DuckDuckGo. Of course, explained constructively & in detail, it just looks like I think readers on Hacker News are idiots. Even my grandmother knows what a "shitty," "terrible," or "bad" search engine is. Such terms are how laypeople universally describe search functionality that fails to turn their queries into actionable information. They also short-hand what's common knowledge to save time. Describing your search experience in detail to such people will even sound condescending. So, instead I just usually say it's a a hit and miss search engine with result being them nodding their head in understanding. The other commenter apparently thought so, too, condensing it to one word and I still knew what it meant.
What search terms are you using? Ideally, could you provide some searches that perform poorly on ddg, but well if you prepend g! to the term (which runs an anonymized google search)?
If the difference always comes down to google search personalization (so you can't provide a search others can repeat), that would also be interesting to know.
Here is the only query I ran in 2016 (so far) where ddg's results convinced me to use google, and then I found my answer on google:
drmSetMaster permission denied
The correct answer is to install xorg-server-legacy, and edit Xwrapper. I was looking for the now incorrect answer about setting some X binary setuid root. Both search engines provide lots of very out-of-date results, so I filtered ddg on setuid about half way through my search there.
Calling this query a "win" for google is questionable, but it is their top performer for me in the last year. Also the page with the answer does contain the string setuid.
Ddg does not. I strongly prefer the ddg behavior. To each their own.
Don't even remember. It was mostly technology, history, academic papers, games, movies, and so on. I'm someone whose good at working around search engines but has a bad memory. I'm unfortunately not a good test case for the input as I get good at unconsciously working around problems to make a better baseline. I did have to regularly switch over to Google, though.
"but well if you prepend g! to the term (which runs an anonymized google search)?"
I didn't know about that feature at all. Thanks for telling me. I was going to run search through DDG and Google next time I have trouble to document the difference. Now, I'm considering doing DDG, DDG w/ Google option, and Google itself to see what the per-user customizations bring vs anonymized Google.
"If the difference always comes down to google search personalization"
I didn't think about that angle with Google. Surprised I overlooked it. I don't think it was affecting my search as a lot of it should have a large number of searchers. The esoteric stuff definitely got better results in Google over DDG's default, esp CompSci papers. Before I had Search Link Fix, I would type them into DDGo to get an actual, non-Google link to the PDF. This usually worked but some papers didn't exist in DDG at all. Even though they probably should've indexed the site (eg a university). So, it was clearly a deficiency. Other times, it was an obscure site that's been around a while but maybe low traffic dropped it out of a cache or something. Google had it since they store pages & have been for long time. (shrug)
So, maybe I can collect these into a little pile of files to drop on the team for their debugging.
"so I filtered ddg on setuid about half way through my search there."
Worst-case scenario. It's happened to me on occasion when a common term, esp reported in any news outlet, flooded my results with garbage. Eliminate it hoping to filter the noise. Usually works but this time the signal went out with the noise. I'm not so harsh on search engines with things like that since people in support forums drop all kinds of jargon that may or may not be related during discussion of a specific problem. I think that causes the bad results.
Out of curiosity, though, I ran your example. Your example is weird. They get the same top result with next best on one being a StackOverflow answer while another looks at StackExchange. I don't know what you were trying to do where I can't gauge the effectiveness of the answer. Here's a pastebin with the top 5 results I'm getting as of today:
Did one or both have the answer?
It is the equivalent to me replying to you with:
"You don't know why the comment sucks because you also suck."
Instead of pointing you to this wonderful Paul Graham article:
While these are all true, we're on a message board, not debating in Ancient Greece. I am very sympathetic to calls to improve comment quality, but on the other hand it's unrealistic to expect someone to perform a deep technical analysis of why Google is better... in a message board comment.
Yet, the original comment was sensible just because of two things:
1. Everyone on the Internet that uses a search engine knows what a good or bad one is. It has one purpose: turn your query into information you can use. If people say it doesn't or it's "shitty," then it's not doing it's job as a search engine effectively. All we really need to know.
2. The more specific information is better directed at the DuckDuckGo support or development teams to help them improve their alogrithms. Posting piles of data in Hacker News comments would only seem useful for the use-case I described above, people studying effectiveness of search engines via terms + results (better done elsewhere), or people reverse engineering DuckDuckGo's algorithm. I don't see why we'd expect people to produce or post that data as it's a lot of work and screen space.
2) There is at least one ddg developer here (not me), and HN is generally a good source of constructive feedback for startups. Maybe the original commenter's query string would help ddg or a competitor improve their product.
I am sure there is a presentation bias. I am sure that there are plenty of cases where a user cannot tell if a set of results are good or bad for a specific query. I am sure some users have trouble communicating why they think a specific result is good or bad.
However can people tell the general quality of a search engine? Absolutely. Google's simple aesthetics certainly helped them, but they didn't become the top search engine by luck and aesthetics alone. AltaVista, Yahoo, Lycos, Excite were all junk compared to Google, even the first version. It was very obvious.
The research I'm citing is from the late 00's. At this point in the game, differences in search relevance are in the measurement noise.
2. DDG has contact info. I maintain that it's better to send data directly to them if one is troubleshooting it or helping them improve the product. Hoping a random employee is on same tech forum is a stretch despite it happening here more often than average. So, if we all did search data, we'd post it on a dedicated forum they host after we email them about the project.
This is false, as has already been pointed out.
If by 'shitty' you mean it has areas for improvement then yes I agree; as does your tact.
I think the search engine space is very ripe for a startup, but duckduckgo isn't it IMHO.
Would you? Most search engines' growth, including Google, was fueled by advertising revenue. Obviously that part of the equation isn't really an option for DDG.
I wonder if they would be better off as a non-profit, like Wikipedia. I would donate to them.
Google search has been "good enough" for years, and so has the competition.
Multiple companies have burnt billions proving that search relevance will not convert users on its own.
If you want to crush Google, you need some compelling reason for people to switch (voice? privacy?), or you need to maintain good relevance until Google screws up badly enough. Maybe they will fire half the search team during an economic downturn in the 2020's, for example. At that point, you can use cash reserves to poach most of the top 10% of the remaining team.
The problem with long games like this is that you might screw up or lose focus before Google does. This happened at Yahoo.
Switching industry sectors, Microsoft had tons of negative press about 8, 8.1 and then 10's force upgrade/privacy debacle. With a mediocre or better hardware launch, Apple probably would have cleaned up. Instead, Apple's MacOS lines happened to falter in the same years as Windows did. Now, Windows devices are earning lukewarm to positive comparisons against Apple devices.
Really? I've never heard this, do you have anymore information about it?
https://duck.co/forum/comment/27893
Edit, that's about 5 years old. The current page on Wikipedia provides a more recent explanation.
"DuckDuckGo's results are a compilation of "about 50" sources,[42] including Yahoo! Search BOSS; Wikipedia; Wolfram Alpha; Bing; its own Web crawler, the DuckDuckBot; and others."
http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/10-meta-search-engine...
Not sure how marketable it is, though. Google is pretty dominant. Most companies already running their stuff through it.